Bernie Sanders unveils 32-hour workweek bill

People work to support their lives. For any individual or family, this is a fixed number of sorts. Housing, food, basic costs that are necessary, and to some extent consistent. So aside from other influences, they need a certain level of income, consistently. If they reduce the hours they will work, they will still need it, and that means they would want the 40-hour income for working 32 hours.

That raises the cost to make and the price to sell of everything we make- and it will also lower the quantity we produce, depleting supply, and triggering price increases. Even without the supply change, the 32 hour paycheck would be inadequate.

Bernie Sanders was a hippie. Lived in a commune for a while, where the members were all supposed to share in the work as well as the benefits. Bernie thought what he needed to do was talk about it, promote the ideas he still promotes today; basically that someone else should pay the bills. The other members of the commune eventually got tired his refusal to do his share, and pushed him out.

Look at Bernies history, and you see that he learned nothing from that. He made his way all his life with BS, appealing to human weakness, using people- and couldn't keep jobs, until he got in politics, where that seems to be more acceptable. Bernie is a fool, appealing to fools, telling them that their productivity is unrelated to their quality of life, and that there is no reason to plant your own garden when your neighbor has a good one you can steal from.

 

How silly of me. They're hero's; every one.

 

You ought to know better than to think snark will do. I did not ask if 'they were heroes' I asked if you knew how many hours they normally actually worked because that was the point of this post #2 right here. "How about a bill to get Senators to work at least 32 hours a week?" Is there any reason to suppose that they don't put in a lot more time than 32 hours considering its a salaried job, and they are constantly being put into public situations where they are representing as Senators? I don't think you are really stupid enough to say that they are not working if they are not literally on the floor of the Senate or in a committee room.

Its a serious question. Do you know whether they work long hours or not, because I have been under a different impression.

 

Lol at idiots like Bernie thinking they can dictate market forces without repercussions.

These people couldn't pass econ101.

 

Something is going to have to change soon. The World Economic Forum is estimating that 65% of retail jobs will be gone by next year, and by the mid-2030's 30% of ALL jobs will be automated due to AI, and will only increase from there. It could easily be that further breakthroughs increase this pace even faster.

I'm not sure what the answer is, or if workhours per week would even factor into this at all, but very soon I think we are going to have a huge number of people that simply cannot get a job, because there are none available. A lot of those people will be ones who spent fortunes on education, only to find that the career they were sure would feed them their whole lives is suddenly gone, with no jobs available to retrain into.

Again, maybe this has nothing to do with the length of the work week, but I think the overall structure of society is going to have to change very very soon. If working less hours per week is going to be a problem financially, what about zero hours per week?

 

Like college professors, Bernie has never experienced real life. Don't worry. This nonsense will go nowhere.

 

I'm not with Bernie on this (its stupid and not sustainable as much as I'd love a 3 day weekend), but, I DO agree with his reasoning for it. The system is currently very flawed and biased to the top positions. Here's my solution. BONUS SHARING
I get it, one person makes 400k because they moved up to that position and another person makes 40k because they are in a different position (maybe entry level or something).
I'm not sure how bonuses work at other companies but at mine its based on your review. Normally you have to get "meets expectations" to get the full amount. to not get the full amount you really have to screw stuff up.
I don't think its fair that someone who makes 400k gets a bonus based on that number.
Here's how I'd do it.
Pool ALL THE BONUS money and then divey it out evenly (almost evenly) according to what they would have gotten based on ther performancej.
Example - a company with 2 people. one makes 100k, one makes 50k, they each got the max bonus review score, lets just call it 3%.
In total that would a 3k bonus for the 100k person and a 1.5k bonus for the 50k person which is 4.5k which IMO should be 2.25K for each of them. Also, I have a very good salary, something like this would negatively impact me for sure but I wouldn't mind. I also spent a very large portion of my life in that lower financial denomination so I've experienced this from both sides.
I know its crazy and has the scent of socialism but I don't believe in that stupid word anyway, I believe in math and fairness and IMO that would be fair. Many people could very easily make the other argument, that its fine the way it is and if they earned the higher salary, they earned the higher bonus (and you wouldn't be wrong but this is just my opinion)
Cheers!

 

Hahahahhaha! Omg!

 

Both house and senate have 8 days "in session" in March. However, in session is not the working time as we normally think of it.
A session that continues into a second calendar day without adjourning still constitutes only one legislative day, but if a chamber adjourns, then reconvenes later on the same day,
the single day of session includes two legislative days.

And much of what they would do is not done "in session", it's done with staff and meetings with people other with the rest of congress. As far as I know, there is no way to determine how many hours are involved- or how many of those hours could be deemed productive to work. There are around 12,000 registered lobbyists in DC today, and roughly $4-5 billion dollars spent on lobbying each year. Those people outnumber members of congress more than 20 to one, and their job is to reach and influence them. How much of our politicians time is spent having lunches or meeting with such influencers we don't know, but they would consider that "work".

The staff of a member of congress have tiers, as a typical office might have, but includes volunteers and interns. These are mostly unpaid people there to learn about politics from the inside. Valuable background for those who might become politicians or lobbyists or have any connections with politics in the future, aided not only by what they learn, but by the connections they make and people they meet. Such people handle the mail and basic chores, they filter it, respond to things that need response and can be done with form letters or boilerplate, separate more important things and pass them up to the chief of staff, who reviews it again and passes a more reduced amount of it to the politician. Thus an office might get 150 letters or contacts in a day, 25 get to the chief of staff- perhaps 5 get to the actual member.

It's hardly a position easy to take over. Each congress prints a new version of what's called Jefferson's manual which includes the rules. Typically- 1500 pages. You would need a highly skilled chief of staff just to keep from being overwhelmed by the complexity. It's very difficult to determine how hard these people are working in any productive sense.

We have no realistic oversight of what they do, or how- and that puts the people at a disadvantage in deciding who deserves to be in office.

 

I see you are really upset at my swipe at our glorious leadership. You will definitely be the last to stop clapping as they award themselves medals for bravery.

The serious answer to your question is I don't look at it as a salaried job, I look at it as based on production. The spend an incredible amount of time in committee hearings and in their office and very little on the floor. Which wouldn't bother me if they weren't so unproductive. Take the recent Senate "compromise" on immigration/funds for Ukraine and Israel. They spent several months in secret negotiations that they HAD to know was never going to fly. To me it was DOA as soon as McConnell named the GOP senators for it. But...they spent months and months doing something that was going to be canned as soon as they released it. So in my opinion they should have that time deducted from their salaries for wasting their and our time.

 

Although I can see flexible hours as a partial response to AI, the massive pay raise per hour that Bernie's proposal has means that's not going to happen. A partial response to the elimination of girlboss email jobs is that women will start looking for husbands and will suddenly discover they wanted to be a tradwife after all.

 

Lol, maybe. I honestly have no idea what it is going to look like. I don't think we are going to recognize our society in a decade or so. Hopefully for the better.

 

It has become completely dysfunctional. Nothing in the legislative branch is working these days, but its not the efforts to find a compromise, even at low chance, that is the problem. It is a salaried job so they need to try to get something done. Its the performative artists who want to blow up legislation for talking points with the base that is the real problem. .

 

That entire negotiation fiasco was performance art.

 

Nope. It was the only negotiation going at all. The only active vehicle moving anywhere. So its everyone who was not involved or supportive of the effort that was unproductive on the issue.

 

Weird take but OK.

 

I wouldn't worry about it. 99% of anything Bernie is behind never makes it off MSNBC.

 

Go ask Target and Wallmart about self checkout. With people stealing ****, either the stores close or they hire more people.

 

AI security droids, lol. Maybe we'll see bots start to stomp thieves.

 

This RW thread went immediately from a proposed 32hr work week, to price controls. My compliments on your investigative prowess on the matter.

 

I wouldn't put that as a sure thing, to be honest. It sort of relies on a continuation of Biden's presidency into a second term. That's because Biden talks about setting price controls and has already done so with drug prices. It's just vaguely related.

 

That won't work. All it will it do will create shortages and add to the overtime for accountants who had to report more useless statistics to the stupid government which can't interpret them.

Nixon put on price controls in the early 1970s. The idea failed miserably. There were shortages of everything. I know because I was a cost accountant at a chemical company at the time. The government wanted mountains of paperwork to show that our costs of production had gone up. Energy prices were through the roof because of the OPEC oil embargo. Our energy costs were above the profit plan by 300%. The old time liberal economists call that "cost push inflation." You either raised prices or went out of business.

 

The only part of the bill that interests me is the requiring of time x 1.5 for days longer than 8 hours which I would modify to 10 hours . Lets get some waitresses and caregivers some more money or more time off their feet.

 

Of course the 32 hour work week would not work for all businesses. I would certainly work 2 more hours a day to get a 3 day weekend every week. Right now for many there is too much work and not enough life. People are stressing and this would help many. It should not be made a law.